Lucid Dreaming

Hi,
I just read about a technique called Lucid Dreaming.The article says that through that technique,we can control our dreams like "Inception".Have you heard about this?I wish i could learn this thing.I googled and i couldn't find the exact answer.

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I've had Lucid Dreams before but I didn't prepare myself for them, they just happened. So, I can't really be of much help. I'm sorry, man.

I've had strange experiences with pot. Close enough, right?

Haha. I've been there. xD Aaaannnddd Close enough.. ish.

I tell myself every night before I go to sleep that I will realize I am dreaming and i will take control of my dreams. I have done it exactly twice in my life and both times I got so excited that i realized that I was dreaming that I woke up!

Seriously, one day I will make it happen without waking myself up.

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I read about it a while back, very interesting stuff. I can recall a very brief instance of it happening to me, but I woke up pretty much immediately. Apparently there are techniques you can use to make it more likely, keeping a dream diary being one of them, if I remember correctly.

I got so excited that i realized that I was dreaming that I woke up!


Haha! Same thing happened to me. As soon as I realized I was dreaming I woke up. I wasn't really able to control my movements. It was like being so intoxicated I couldn't stand but I tried anyway. However I could control who and what I wanted to see, in the very short period I had

I definitely had a couple after watching Inception. It's an incredible feeling, just wish I could do it on the spot.

Has anyone ever had these really uncomfortable dream moments where they feel like they are awake but can't move? It's quite difficult to describe, but that almost feels like a lucid dream in the sense that I know i'm dreaming but i'm awake at the same time.

I have had sleep paralysis a lot, which is where you wake up internally but you can't open your eyes or move your body because your body is still asleep. It's HORRIBLE. I used to get it quite a lot but not in awhile. I also have had experiences -- and I'm not trying to seem crazy by saying this, lots of other people have reported having this -- with sleep paralysis where you're half asleep/half dreaming and you have these hallucinations of really scary things coming to get you. It's like there's a feeling of something that's just evil in your bedroom and suddenly it all feels very real and the only thing you can do is try to ignore it and go back into a regular sleep experience.

As for lucid dreams, I've had those a lot, too. I have never been able to make them happen at will, though. Sometimes I've just become aware that I'm in a dream and been able to make things happen. More often, though, is that the dream is just really intense -- you feel like you're in an actual other world instead of just a typical dream with a story you remember upon awaking. There's more control and more focus. I had one about a month ago, actually -- I was flying around a city. It was very vivid - everything looked real. As it's happening, you can't quite believe your mind is capable of having such intense unreal vision. However, I have found that you usually run the risk of waking up soon once you're aware that you're dreaming -- I don't know what it is - maybe your mind decides it might as well just be awake. Maybe it's too close to the stage of actually being awake.

But, yeah, these things are real. We have quite the entertainment system in our heads -- although, I've heard some people never experience these things.

I've had this a lot too. Wake up, can't move. It's terrifying, especially when I've seen things at the same time. Once it was a guy walking around in the living room outside my bedroom. Another time it was a shadowy figure (and feeling of evil) standing at the foot of my bed. I've even had the feeling of some kind of creature sitting on my chest breathing in my face. This is commonly the kind of stuff that gets reported, too. It's happened about a dozen times to me, in various combinations. How odd that it's so consistent from person to person...

Yep, exactly right. It's only happened to me twice, both in the past year. The first one, I was in my old highschool and everything was clear as day, and I knew I was dreaming. I could control myself and started walking forward, but it was all in slow motion. I remember pushing through a door, feel exhilarated that I could control myself in the dream, but I soon woke up.

The second was more terrifying. I was sleeping alone (girlfriend hadn't moved in yet), and in the dream I was in my house, knew I was dreaming, and started walking up the steps... again, slow motion. I could hear faint speech and somehow knew that it was talking to me, but didn't pay it much mind. All of a sudden, the very real feeling of a hand touching my shoulder while I was sleeping (even though I was dreaming) came over me, and the feeling was that it wanted to harm me. I woke up immediately and nobody was there. Scaaaary.

I'm fascinated by dreams. I really am. One interesting book I've read (with theories about dreams and lucid dreams) is called The Dreaming Universe by Fred Alan Wolf.

I, too, find it odd that people always report the presence of evil. For me, though, I always hear the evil instead of seeing it, usually. I actually had a sleep paralysis event like this earlier this year and it was my first in a long time. I actually had a weird half awake/half asleep thing happen to me last night, although it wasn't sleep paralysis. But my sleep paralysis events usually contain evil voices and laughter and threats. I swear it's probably where people got the idea of Hell. It literally feels like tuning into Hell sometimes. ONLY WHEN I'M ASLEEP THOUGH, PEOPLE. I do not experience these things in waking life.

I had one experience back in 2004 where I was in a lucid dream or something -- but it was different. It was like sleep paralysis and a lucid dream combined. It didn't have any evil, though. There was a man above me on my bed looking down at me and talking to me - telling me about this man in the bathroom next to me. And I could see a man in the bathroom. Then I woke up and later told my boyfriend, Oh my god. I just experienced the weirdest thing ever. I'm convinced that there's another dimension sharing our own! I literally believed that morning that I had crossed over to another dimension because the dream felt like I was still in my bedroom but different people were there. And it felt like it really happened - it didn't feel like a dream where you wake up and know it wasn't real.

Oh WOW. Yeah, I'm thinking more and more that dreams aren't entirely generated out of our subconscious... or I'm at least underestimating all the many things our subconscious can store and summon up. I'm not usually one to say there's a spirit world of any kind, but I haven't really experienced any trauma or abuse in my life, such that I would be able to conjure feelings of evil or terrifying visions like the ones I've experienced. When it's happened while dreaming, I've genuinely felt like I was experiencing a presence that was outside my own mind. Something that was there, like you say, on another plane of existence.

But it's hard to really know what's happening. I dream often, and sometimes I dream that I'm experiencing people and/or information that is completely foreign to me. But somehow in the dream, it all seems very sensible. It's so weird. I never know if I truly knew something about what I dreamed, or if I didn't and was somehow learning new information from some external source. Just last night, I dreamed that I was talking to Chad Ochocinco, a professional football player, and he was explaining all these complex terms and concepts about running routes - stuff I don't really know a thing about. Was I really accessing dormant information, or did I somehow co-dream with Ochocinco?

Fred Alan Wolf seems to think there's more to it than just what our brains are creating. I need to look at the book again for a better description of what it says.

I - and some other people I know - have dreamt things that did seem to foretell the future in some way. Not always, though. There was something that happened last year, though, where I had a dream and a certain element/person from the dream ended up being involved in the situation days later. Who knows if this is really psychic awareness though? Perhaps my mind was just figuring out something on an unconscious level and it made an accurate prediction. I do believe there's many unconscious levels of awareness we're not aware of normally. I think these things can be brought up in things like dreams or even by taking drugs.

As for the frightening elements of sleep paralysis... from my talks with another guy who had them, they started with him when he started going through puberty. Same thing happened with me. Never had them as a child. They were more frequent in my teenage years, too. Perhaps it has something to do with growth hormones or something. Why evil? I don't know. This is also where the idea of succubuses and incubuses came from. If I was to give a more natural than supernatural explanation for it all, I'd say it all does come from us -- from our natural bodies, at least. We're human -- we're capable of great evil. Maybe that's a way it gets expressed. Maybe it's madness we repress. Maybe it's anger and hostility and raw, wicked behavior. Afterall, if it's not supernatural, then it really does spring from your body. The same friend I used to talk about this - who was very smart - thought that there's a part of our brain that is always talking, always coming up with random, incoherent things, unconsciously - just because it needs to do it. I don't know if that's true or not, though. The brain is a weird thing, though. Everything we experience is filtered. There are many different parts of the brain that control different things, even with how we experience and think, now just how it moves and controls the rest of our body.

Not sure what "lucid dreaming" is but I've had strange dreams all my life, which I often seem to be watching as an on-stage performance while I'm seated safe and detached in an otherwise empty theater. Occasionally I have dreams in which I simply "switch channels" from one to something more interesting. I was probably about 9 the first that happen and remember it vividly nearly 60 years afterward. Had a dream in which I seemed to be in danger, consciously thought to myself, "Oh, I don't wanta see this" and immediately [at least I wasn't conscious of a time lag] switched to another dream. Anyway, the dream-leap landed me in the middle of a different dream but in a situation that seemed even more threatening, at which time I said to myself the 9-year-old equivalent of "to hell with this" [probably those exact words]--and in my mind just turned off the dream machine, at which point everything faded into black. Wasn't the only time that happened, but being the first, it was the most memorable.

I also almost always dream in color and sound, which I remember reading once is fairly unusual. It's not just I dream someone has said something of a general nature. I dream the exact words being said in the exact tone and including the exact voice of the person talking. Sometimes I've "written" entertaining--one might say even clever--dialog, music, and lyrics to accompany a specific dream. I also cast historic persons into my dreams--for instance, actor Ralph Belamy, scientist Albert Einstein, and George Armstrong Custer. Sometimes I recast classic films, like having Alan Ladd play Bogart's role of Mad-dog Earl in High Sierra. And I usually remember my dreams enough to know I've had several within a single night and am able to recount most of what I dreamed the next morning.

I quit having nightmares after my second divorce. I occasionally still see what could be horrific creatures and incidents in my dreams, but they're never frightening because I'm seated back in 10th row center safe from whatever is happening "on stage" in my dream .

What do you mean, Rufnek, about the sitting in an empty theatre in your dreams? Does it actually feel like you're in a theatre watching your dreams - can you see this theatre?

I dream in color and sound, too. I never feel like I'm in a theatre observing things, though. I've had some trouble recently recalling my dreams, but I can recall what I dreamt about last night -- some things, at least. I once heard a certain song in my dream playing exactly as it sounds and I had to wake up and listen to it. It felt deeply connected to me emotionally and I wasn't sure why because it was never a song that felt that important to me. On rare occasions, I hear people speaking the strangest things to me and I've woke myself up laughing over it. They usually don't even make sense. When I was a kid, I used to sleepwalk (don't anymore) and I can remember lots of occasions where I woke up saying odd things and believing I was still in my dream world. Very strange what the mind can do.

No

Lucid dreaming isn't that helpful. Meditation can get you to control your dreams far more, lucid dreaming is more for separate observation, something that QiGong is much better for.

Don't bring episode 1 into this, man.

I recently had one where I was navigating freely around an empty environment modeled after a part of a college campus I travel through frequently. I could bounce freely into the air and had real feelings of vertigo and acceleration.

There were no people, and it looked like sim city graphics. It also didn't last long, but I was definitely "testing" my surroundings. The sky was pink and not blue. I've had others but I forget them completely. This is probably the first one I will keep a written record of; i.e. this post.

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Also, in response to all this supernatural stuff, I'm pretty sure dreaming is the brain's equivalent of bouncing your knee during moments where you've been sitting a while. Your body has all kinds of unconscious stuff going on all the time. Any kind of skilled expertise is in some way unconscious and automatic.

In fact the only reason we wouldn't have something like dreams is if our brains were completely shut down when we sleep. If it's still "on" then chances are it's doing something. It's living tissue and its not dead, so it's doing something. Your stomach is doing something even when there's no food in it. Notice how certain anesthesias supress dreams because they act specifically on the brain.

Attaching mystical significance to dreams is like attaching mystical significance to homeostatic breathing.

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It happens to me on occasion, i'll just be dreaming and i'll realize "hey, this is a dream!". I can't quite remember if I typically wake up or not, but if I do, i'm only partially awake and I fall back asleep pretty quickly.

This is, of course, if we're all talking about the same thing here

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It's more the feeling I'm in a theater at a live performance--I mean, I don't look around at other members of the audience nor am I aware of someone sitting in front, beside, or behind me, and I don't go out for a drink or pee during intermission. It's more like an empty theater in that I know I'm THE spectator, whatever is being performed is for my benefit. And it's definitely live theater in that it's happening as I see it. The performers are real, not remote as in a movie or on TV. I can go up on the stage and walk among them if I want, but they are not threatening and cannot come in contact with me so that some separation between performers and audience is maintained.

It's not always a theater setting. In a nap a few moments ago, I was with my children back when they were children but at the 50th reunion of my high school graduating class that is scheduled at the end of this month. I was telling them some sea-story about one of my youthful adventures when I noticed a guy leaning against the wall across the room, a fellow with whom I went to high school. I excused myself from my kids, walked over to my former classmate and told him as we shook hands that he had changed the least of all the people I had seen at the reunion. Didn't matter I didn't recall seeing anyone else at that moment or that he looked exactly like he did in high school--hadn't aged at all. It was like a combination of actually seeing and talking to him and at the same time seeing and hearing me interact with him. (Later in that dream I did encounter other classmates who also had aged very little, as had I--they were all female and I kissed and hugged them all like we were still in our teens.)

Also, like a theater, some sets will reappear in my dreams--an old house sitting damaged on a muddy European battlefield in one dream may be recyled as a well-kept Kansas farmhouse in another. A large air termnial through which I and others are wandering may be recognizeable as a massive warehouse (think the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark) in another.

Sometimes I get involved in a search or a trip in which there are unanswered puzzles to solve, but mostly it's more like watching a play by other performers unfold.

As for songs, I usually awake each morning with some song running through my head, something I'll sing in the shower and hum through the rest of the day. Not necessarily related to a dream--just my "song du jour." Occasionally my dream-in-the-empty-theater is a musical filled with lovely songs with witty lyrics and involving chorus lines of dancers, with me thinking at the time, "I gotta remember to tell my wife about this when I wake up!"

As for waking laughing, I've even come out of anesthesia laughing. I've also awaken from dreams talking and, occasionally, crying. On rare occasions, I've awakened fighting, just punhing hell out of a pillow or mattress; once I even clipped my sleeping wife.

Odd thing--I've never ever sleepwalked, not once; yet I dream almost nightly, sometimes several times a night, and generally remember the gist of what I dreamed sometimes in minute detail.

My wife, on the other hand, did sleepwalk as child, often to the point of going outdoors. Yet she rarely dreams and doesn't remember much about it when she does. She of course is much more practical and mature than I am.

I used to wake up naked in some weird places man